madame leniou returns—briefly—to Athens, to a domestic space: a 1936 apartment designed by Dimitris Pikionis, everything you ever wanted. Convince yourself that’s what you want. After a brief winter and unnaturally sunny but cruel spring she comes back to a life she used to have. The lifestyle spoiled. The spoils of lifestyle. […]
Participating artists include: Steve Bishop, Anna Clegg, Ian Law, Erasmia Kadinopoulou, Will Sheridan Jr., Vunkwan Tam, Constantin Thun
opening in Athens: Saturday 07 June, 2025, 3–7pm. Open through June, by appointment.
Galerie Khoshbakht is thrilled to announce the opening of the exhibition Portrait II – presenting works by Beth Collar, Behrang Karimi, Mitchell Kehe, René Kemp, Yoora Park and Raha Raissnia.
“With this exhibition we are presenting our programme to New York City. Bringing together a group of artists undoubtably will put things into perspective. Lively conjugations, visual languages, memories, material histories; they fold into each other, dragging one another by the hand. The system will be put in place. However, living these ways of instituting, putting the distant thinking on the side and allowing our own lived experience to take centre, we slowly come to the realization that institutions and programs, no matter how they express themselves, are a beautiful thing; not because we must be critical of them but because we live in them.”
Opening: Friday, May 23, 6–8 pm May 24 – June 28, 2025
ZHI Foundation in Beijing has opened a new exhibition inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, on view from May 20 2025 through March 30 2026. Participating artists include Fei Erqi, Wang Hui, Yu Zhiding, Gai Qi, Mai Trung Thu, K.C. Chww, Cheung Pak Kan, Wing-Tong Lee, Luigi Ghirri, Robert Mapplethorpe, Martin Wong, David Rappeneau. Liu Xiaodong, Liu Ye, Elizabeth Peyton, Kai Althoff, Yuichi Yokoyama, Izumi Kato, Wang Xingwei, Urs Fischer, Anri Sala, Mika Rottenberg, Allison Katz, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Sanya Kantarovsky, Yu Nishimura, Chen Fei, Firenze Lai, Tao Hui, Raphaela Simon, Brook Hsu, Sasaoka Yuriko, Taro Masushio, Hiroka Yamashita and Henry Shum.
A new wallpaper and three wall-based works by Tishan Hsu are on view at the exhibition “360°: why we paint?” at BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou, curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Sun Man, running from 16 May to 12 October 2025. A collaboration between BY ART MATTERS and Il Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Italy, the exhibition presents over a hundred works by 39 artists internationally.
Drawing inspiration from Butoh, the artist’s show at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, features collages of queer bodies
“We know we’re in a haunted house: Slug Sex (2025) – a video projection of two encircling slugs – is our first sight in ‘The Garden of Loved Ones’. Its cast light catches in the cobwebs of the gallery’s darker corners. The slug who deigns to top pushes out a goopy blue phallus that runs the length of its body, slugs being a hermaphroditic species. And this, being a Richard Hawkins joint.
Around the bend hang the 2012 ‘Ankoku’ collages, exhibited in that year’s Whitney Biennial. These compositions – hastily cut archival materials and notes taped intuitively beside printouts and calligraphy – mimic the notebooks of Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the postwar Japanese dance form Butoh. Their posthumous publication disclosed how Hijikata approached choreography with a collage-like glom, pasting gestures torn from Western art history books alongside handwritten directives. Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario write in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2019), Butoh – which roughly translates to ‘waltz of darkness’ – is a loosening of signification that champions ‘arbitrary chains of movement [and] diseased or socially dispossessed peoples, or bodies in pain’.”
Born in New Zealand and now based in Los Angeles, the artist Emma McIntyre is no stranger to frequent travel. But the vibrant art scene of Hong Kong, the site of her second exhibition with David Zwirner, is a bit farther afield than even McIntyre ever imagined herself. Titled Among my swan, a name she’s borrowed from Mazzy Star, the show demonstrates the artist’s taste for chromatic abstractions that transcend the limits of language. “By introducing the swan motif,” McIntyre told Richard Hawkins last month, “I can connect to all the painted swans in art history.” She does so using oil paint alongside unconventional materials like oxidized iron, a gambit, Hawkins says, that suggests McIntyre’s granular attention to her artistic forbearers. “I think the difference is your investment in the history of painting,” he says, “but also how closely you look at other paintings.” Fresh off his own show at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery, The Garden of Loved Ones, he and McIntyre got on a Zoom to discuss their shared obsessions: Baudelaire, art historian Michael Levey, and painting with your body, literally.
Cici Wu: Lanterns from the Unreturned marks the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, bringing together key works from the past decade and centering on a new large-scale, site-specific commission of the same name.
Central to the exhibition is Lanterns from the Unreturned (2025), a newly commissioned site-specific installation occupying the museum’s East Staircase. Originally built in 1933 for the Royal Asiatic Society, the building was repurposed in the 1970s to store confiscated books during the Cultural Revolution. Wu reanimates this forgotten history through arrangements of lanterns in book form, handcrafted from bamboo and conservation-grade paper traditionally used in rare book restoration. These sculptures line the staircase’s windows and interior, echoing the bundled books that once filled the space. The installation imagines a spectral return, volumes drifting back into the building as flickering presences, alive with the possibility of being read once more. At dusk, the lanterns begin to glow, casting inward and outward light, illuminating the museum’s East Staircase like a vertical scroll. Visible from Huqiu Road even after the museum’s operation hours, these fragile vessels hold space for the unspoken and the unreturned, allowing stories once silenced to shimmer faintly back into view.
The exhibition is organized by X Zhu-Nowell, Executive Director and Chief Curator and Karen Wang, Assistant Curator and Researcher at Rockbund Art Museum.
On view through September 28, 2025 and a year-long, site-specific installation.
As part of Oslo Open ’25, Doris Guo and other artists will be opening their studios from April 26-27 this weekend.
As the roof caved in on the empire of the US dollar, a son of the diaspora returned to an art market buzzing despite censorship and mass exodus. Enter the Chinese century?
1.
Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, lives in an area of my mind with high green hills and banquet halls and concrete residential towers whose balconies jut like vertebrae along spines made of stone. Wild boar roam the hills in the dark. Political prisoners in the Stanley jail bake in humidity and sweat without any air-conditioning. Jet-lagged from New York, I was taking a nap one afternoon in our hotel on the southern coast of Hong Kong Island, and was dreaming that someone I loved was handing me a piece of paper. I began pulling at it with both hands – it was blank, no message – until I felt someone kissing my face.
Stephen Cheng on Ten Years of Empty Gallery, Jaime Chu, Spike Art Magazine
The founder of Hong Kong art’s black cube on sheltering artists from the system, programming as film-making, and the experimental drug called jet lag.
When I first moved back to Hong Kong as an adult in 2023, a new friend tried to recommend me cool things to do: “During a performance at the closing party for Vunkwan Tam’s show at Empty last year, [owner of noise label Mouhoi] Cedric Ng punched a sink until his hands bled.” They knew what to say, but they didn’t have to try so hard. In Hong Kong, historically an entrepot dominated by blue-chip galleries, unwieldy semi-private institutions, and a constellation of independent art spaces surviving precariously under colossal real estate conditions, Stephen Cheng’s Empty Gallery occupies an eclectic yet somehow exacting niche. It’s where minimalist experimental music, Japanese conceptual art and its heirs, and sculptural and filmic practices at the forefront of the Asian diaspora converge in a renovated industrial space notorious for its dark, cavernous interior. Friends who don’t otherwise care for contemporary art bring themselves to the hour-long queue for the gallery’s annual rave, and its artists have found genuine interlocutors within an industry that does not always afford them time.
Installation view of Xper. Xr: Bad Timing.
Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery
Photo: Michael Yu
繼 《Tailwhip》之後,Empty Gallery 再度為大家帶來與Xper.Xr 二度合作的展覽 《Bad Timing》,展出的是 Xper.Xr 在近三十年間首度發佈的全新創作。 Xper 在香港藝術史中的位置極具開創性及啟導性,但其成就卻一直被忽視;可以說,Xper 幾乎是以單人匹馬之力,肩負起工業音樂、無浪潮和噪音音樂共同傳承中所體現的激進個人主義和反威權主義的各種潛力在一個地區的整體表現。 《Bad Timing》中這位從未停步的煽動者重拾他擱置已久的繪畫實踐 (他前次展出畫作已是1991年在Quart Society的事),當中更出現一種反常及出人意表的轉向,直指社會人像圖。
受到香港近年因政府施政不當、政治衝突及精英棄責所帶來的低氣壓挑動, 這組全新畫作描繪一班傾向背棄公眾信義的國際社政作俑者:由金融專家、科技權威到宗教領袖。每幅人像作品皆相稱於其取自經典流行曲曲目的譏諷式標題(例如「 MTV Makes Me Want To Smoke Crack」),此可視為是 Xper在其職業生涯中對具代表性曲調假意翻唱的執迷延伸轉移到繪畫這個媒介之上,且同時把社會的權力行使與文化產業的運作深刻徹骨地聯繫起來。
取材自公開照片,Xper首先在由豬片拉展而成的圓面上繪畫指涉人物的相像,然後對這人像進行類儀式性塗污,這種表現主義式的朦朧處理,使得出來的畫面充滿了人造膿液、粘液和其他物質所造成的耀目沉積床。這些帶宣洩性(並且非常幽默)的糟蹋痕跡指向這些作品是出自私人表演的隱密領域。它們暗示自身的功能是作為 Xper (可能是失敗的)治療嘗試以從他心智景觀中驅除某些特定公眾人物所帶來的毒性影響——一種在個體經驗與媒體認可共識現實兩者間邊界日益多孔的文化時刻中強而有力的關聯脈衝。然而,如果這些畫作籍它們的表現力在姿態上指向一種理想的控制,在這樣做之時它們是充分了解到這只是一種出自青少年幻想式的簡單動作——缺乏任何真正的政治效力,帶出的只是以黑色至極的幽默作為潛在阻力的一種形式。
雖然《Bad Timing》展出的人像畫作為宣洩憤怒多少帶著真摯的出口可能發揮了很好的作用,但就如 Xper 其他的創作實踐般,它們充斥著矛盾和自我破壞、死路和拐錯彎:在私下操縱中成自動毀滅的悲喜劇物品。它們預演甚至沈醉於其自身的社政失敗,把批評——藝術資本最吹噓的形式——搬演為自我撕破的鬧劇。這組畫作與觀者及彼此交換著合謀的目光,作為一個整體它們又似乎表達出一種了解恐懼的感覺:鬼崇惡意的一種模仿,或是潛伏於宏莊詭計背後一種龐大而可怕共謀的輪廓。當其優雅地指使空間的中央位置讓路予迷宮般的黑暗時,《Bad Timing》 讓人聯想到社政的未來不僅已被取消了回贖權,並且以某種方式故意妥協了——受制於一種永遠潛伏在我們集體意識邊緣之外的幽暗共識。